How to Optimize IT Spend with a Limited Budget

How to Optimize IT Spend with a Limited Budget

Amid a pandemic, it is more important than ever to remain forward-thinking in your IT strategy and maximize the impact of the organization’s IT budgets. As we all now understand, the nature of the current situation has significant short-term budget impacts and will fundamentally change the financial framework of the ongoing patient care model. While the very survival of many organizations are at stake, IT leadership must look at this as an opportunity to enhance the agility of your current organization and positioning it to pivot and lead the change to the patient care model framework.

This article applies the core strategies that as managing partners of T2 Tech Group, both Kevin Torf and I have utilized to build a strong track record for maximizing results with constrained IT budgets.

Here are our top 3 strategies to maximize the impact of your organization’s IT spend:

1. Work with executive leadership to align IT with strategic growth and operational efficiency opportunities

Work with your executive IT steering committee to focus on identifying and investing in impactful priorities.

A critical success factor is to defer low priority projects to maintain focus and accelerate timelines of high impact priorities. Simple to say but difficult to achieve.

2. Understand that IT vendors and service providers are in the same situation and are ready to deal

There has not been a better time to reduce your operational spending and solidify your IT service provider partnerships or develop new ones. Revisit your existing IT cost framework and work with the vendor marketplace to creatively reduce your short- and long-term cost profile.

Revisit your high-cost IT service provider agreements especially those long-standing agreements to ensure that pricing packages reflect the current marketplace

Quickly gain an understanding of the current marketplace for on-premises/off-premises options and IT service packages/cost models

This is difficult for some organizations because of long term IT service provider relationships and it requires time to identify and execute high impact opportunities. We have found that this is well worth the effort if one has the proper perspective, understands the current marketplace, and utilizes a methodology that accelerates the above process.

3. Prepare your organization to make the pivot and ensure long term viability

There has not been a better time to reduce your operational spending and solidify your IT service provider partnerships or develop new ones. Again, revisit your existing IT cost framework and work with the vendor marketplace to creatively reduce your short- and long-term cost profile.

Understand the short term and long-term pivot capabilities such as telemedicine, remote staff collaboration tools, and work from home capabilities

Understand your readiness to enable these pivot capabilities and the cost to close short and long-term gaps

Using the first two strategies, align these IT initiatives with your organization’s priorities to enable – in a timely manner – these pivot capabilities

These pivot technologies will most likely need to be implemented in a phased approach to enable immediate term capabilities and provide you time to implement underlying IT infrastructure improvements to evolve and implement the longer-term pivot strategy and capabilities.

We will continue this blog series identifying methodologies and case studies of how successful IT leadership are productively collaborating with their executive team to position their organization to weather the immediate term crisis and pivot to support the new healthcare provisioning models.

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Robert Konishi is a successful IS Executive with a 20+ year career in the healthcare information technology industry and specialization in executive IS management, enterprise IS architecture, IS operations, and IS project management.

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About T2 Tech Group

We are a leader in the practical application of technology for healthcare and a range of other industries. Since our founding in 2006, we have consistently delivered quality consulting and management advisory services to executives and IT leaders. Unlike many consulting firms, we have no financial interest in vendor selection, freeing our company to focus completely on realizing client goals. Our team balances business and IT needs, uses a proven framework, can see projects from assessment to post-implementation, and practices transparency in everything we do.